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The Florida mom who got Amanda Gorman’s poem restricted says she’s sorry for promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
(JTA) – Months before a Miami-area mother persuaded a local school to remove an Amanda Gorman poem from its elementary-aged library, she was posting antisemitic memes on her Facebook page.
Now, Daily Salinas is apologizing for one of those things — and unrepentant about the other.
“I want to apologize to the Jewish community,” Salinas told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday. She was saying sorry for a Facebook post she shared in March offering a summary of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious antisemitic forgery written more than a century ago in Russia.
“I’m not what the post says,” Salinas said. “I love the Jewish community.”
The post came to light this week after the Miami Herald identified Salinas as the Miami Lakes, Florida, mother who petitioned her children’s school to limit students’ access to the Gorman poem. Gorman read the poem, called “The Hill We Climb,” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Salinas also petitioned the school to restrict children’s books about the Black poet Langston Hughes and about Black and Cuban history. After a committee reviewed her challenges, the Miami-Dade County school district opted to restrict all but one book about Cuba from grades K-5, while leaving them available to middle school students.
Salinas challenged the Gorman poem — which she says she hasn’t read in its entirety — on the grounds that it contains “indirect hate messages.” The review committee said it “erred on the side of caution” in deciding to limit students’ access.
The Miami Herald did not mention Salinas’ social media activity. But after the story about her was published, a left-wing group, Miami Against Fascism, called attention to a Facebook account it identified as hers. The account, which JTA reviewed, features a flood of political posts reflecting right-wing ideologies — and the antisemitic Protocols.
Salinas’ post about the Protocols included a list of steps depicting how “Jewish Zionists” would achieve world domination. The graphic included stages such as “Place our agents and helpers everywhere,” “Replace royal rule with socialist rule, then communism, then despotism,” and “Sacrifice people (including Jews sometimes) when necessary.”
Reached by JTA on Wednesday, Salinas confirmed that the post about the “Protocols” was hers and apologized for it, saying she hadn’t read it beyond the word “communism.” Salinas said her aversion to communism stems from her Cuban identity. She added that English is not her first language.
“I see the word ‘communism,’ and I think it’s something about communism,” she said. “I didn’t read the words.”
Salinas said that her heart became “tight” with pain when she thought that people would see her as antisemitic for sharing the Protocols post. After speaking with JTA, Salinas deleted the post.
Salinas said she was speaking with JTA after declining to talk with other media outlets so that she could apologize. She said she is Christian and added, “We are super protective of the Jewish people.” She added that she has Jewish friends and is a fan of the Israeli Netflix series “Fauda.”
She said the books about Cuba that she challenged “don’t tell the whole story about Cuba, communism, the dictators, their people that are dying and trying to come to America.” The significant population of Spanish-speaking immigrants from countries with a history of communism, many of whom tend to be politically conservative, has played a growing role in the region’s culture wars.
Salinas’ Facebook feed reflects the kinds of right-wing memes that continue to circulate widely, although she told JTA that she did not post everything on it herself. Miami Against Fascism also shared video of Salinas with the Proud Boys, a far-right group with ties to antisemitic activists, as well as a video of her attending a school board protest last year with Moms For Liberty, a “parents’ rights” group active in pushing for book removals across the country. Such groups have been instrumental in leveraging laws signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that enable parents to challenge the presence of any book in school libraries. In some instances, those challenges have led to the removal of books about the Holocaust and Jewish culture.
Salinas told JTA she was not a member of either group and said she had just been in attendance at protests where they were both present. A Moms For Liberty media representative also told JTA Salinas was not a member of the group and said, “We denounce antisemitism in all its forms.”
Asked why she wanted the books removed in the first place, Salinas said she had just been expressing her “opinion” that they did not “support the curriculum” but declined to elaborate.
She said she had only read parts of the books. “They have to read for me because I’m not an expert,” she said. “I’m not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education.”
A representative of the school district told JTA in a statement that “no literature (books or poem) has been banned or removed,” and that “it was determined at the school” that Gorman’s poem was “better suited for middle school students.” In publicly available meeting minutes, the review committee said the “vocabulary” of Gorman’s poem was “determined to be of value for middle school students,” and similarly that the “content and subject matter” of the Hughes poems were determined to be for middle school readers. The district did not respond to JTA’s queries about Salinas’ Facebook activity.
Gorman said on Twitter that she was “gutted” by the removal in Salinas’ children’s school. “Often all it takes to remove these works from our libraries and schools is a single objection,” she wrote.
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The post The Florida mom who got Amanda Gorman’s poem restricted says she’s sorry for promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage
(JTA) — The head of BBC and its top news executive have quit amid allegations that the network misled viewers in coverage of President Donald Trump and the Gaza war.
The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday after a leaked report by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the broadcaster, who accused it of anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias. The memo was published in the right-leaning British newspaper The Telegraph last week.
Prescott accused the BBC of selectively splicing footage of Trump’s speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, in an episode of its documentary show “Panorama.” He said the show patched together sections of the remarks to suggest that Trump said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
These words came from two parts of the speech spoken almost an hour apart, omitting a part in which Trump said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” After Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, in which he said the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol.
Prescott’s memo accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimize Israeli suffering” to “paint Israel as the aggressor” in Gaza. The BBC previously faced backlash over failing to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official, along with using a contributor who said on social media that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did.” The network was also criticized for livestreaming a Glastonbury performance of the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
The BBC has been scrutinized from all political sides over its coverage of Israel and Gaza. Presenter David Yelland called the resignations of Davie and Turness a “coup” by members of the BBC Board who had “systematically undermined” Davie’s team.
Some insiders have raised concerns about Prescott’s friendship with Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board who played a key role in Prescott’s appointment as BBC adviser, according to The Guardian. Gibb was the director of communications for former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May between 2017 and 2019.
Both Trump and the Israeli government applauded the resignations in social media statements.
Israel’s foreign ministry said Davie’s resignation “underscores the deep-seated bias that has long characterised the BBC’s coverage of Israel” but said the problem was not limited to the broadcaster.
“Far too many news outlets are promoting politics disguised as facts, amplifying Hamas’s fake campaigns,” it tweeted. “The time has come for real accountability to restore integrity, fair and factual journalism.”
The chair of the BBC Board, Samir Shah, is expected to apologize for the editing of Trump’s speech on Monday, in a move meant to blunt potential damage to the U.K.-U.S. relationship.
The post BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage appeared first on The Forward.
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Hamas returns remains of hostage held for 11 years as attention deepens around postwar planning
(JTA) — Hamas returned the remains of Hadar Goldin, an Israeli soldier it murdered and kidnapped in 2014, to Israel on Sunday, bringing the number of hostages whose remains it still holds in Gaza to four.
All four were killed when Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The number has shrunk steadily in recent days as Hamas has repatriated the remains of half a dozen hostages, including Itay Chen, the final American-Israeli held in Gaza.
The repatriations have come as Hamas has faced steep pressure, including from U.S. President Donald Trump, to uphold its end of the ceasefire deal that ended fighting in Gaza last month. As part of the deal, Hamas agreed to return all living and deceased hostages immediately, but while 20 living hostages were freed at one time last month, the group has located and released deceased hostages more slowly, sometimes with snafus that have drawn allegations of ceasefire violations.
Now, with the central demand of the first phase nearly satisfied, attention is increasingly turning to what happens next in Gaza, which has effectively been partitioned between areas under Israeli control and areas under Hamas control.
Trump’s plan calls for Israel to fully withdraw over time, but the United States has so far fallen short of convening an “International Stabilization Force” that would run Gaza and allow for its reconstruction. Israel has rejected Turkish participation and on Monday, the United Arab Emirates announced that it had ruled out joining for now.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law who has played a key role in negotiations toward ending the war, is back in Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. No details of their meeting were immediately disclosed.
Trump, meanwhile, is meeting with a different foreign leader in Washington on Monday — Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa. Al-Sharaa, who seized power last year, has sought to project a moderate profile after rising to prominence as an Islamist leader and has permitted Jews and representatives of the Syrian Jewish diaspora to visit Syria, though the tiny number of local Jews remaining say they are not optimistic about a resurgence of their once-mighty community.
Trump has suggested that Syria could join the Abraham Accords, normalization deals with Israel that expanded last week to include Kazakhstan, but that possibility feels far off.
The post Hamas returns remains of hostage held for 11 years as attention deepens around postwar planning appeared first on The Forward.
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BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage
The head of BBC and its top news executive have quit amid allegations that the network misled viewers in coverage of President Donald Trump and the Gaza war.
The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday after a leaked report by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the broadcaster, who accused it of anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias. The memo was published in the right-leaning British newspaper The Telegraph last week.
Prescott accused the BBC of selectively splicing footage of Trump’s speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, in an episode of its documentary show “Panorama.” He said the show patched together sections of the remarks to suggest that Trump said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
These words came from two parts of the speech spoken almost an hour apart, omitting a part in which Trump said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” After Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, in which he said the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol.
Prescott’s memo accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimize Israeli suffering” to “paint Israel as the aggressor” in Gaza. The BBC previously faced backlash over failing to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official, along with using a contributor who said on social media that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did.” The network was also criticized for livestreaming a Glastonbury performance of the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
The BBC has been scrutinized from all political sides over its coverage of Israel and Gaza. Presenter David Yelland called the resignations of Davie and Turness a “coup” by members of the BBC Board who had “systematically undermined” Davie’s team.
Some insiders have raised concerns about Prescott’s friendship with Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board who played a key role in Prescott’s appointment as BBC adviser, according to The Guardian. Gibb was the director of communications for former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May between 2017 and 2019.
Both Trump and the Israeli government applauded the resignations in social media statements.
Israel’s foreign ministry said Davie’s resignation “underscores the deep-seated bias that has long characterised the BBC’s coverage of Israel” but said the problem was not limited to the broadcaster.
“Far too many news outlets are promoting politics disguised as facts, amplifying Hamas’s fake campaigns,” it tweeted. “The time has come for real accountability to restore integrity, fair and factual journalism.”
The chair of the BBC Board, Samir Shah, is expected to apologize for the editing of Trump’s speech on Monday, in a move meant to blunt potential damage to the U.K.-U.S. relationship.
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The post BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.